Month: November 2015

I’ve been wanting to read a lot more lately than I have actually been able to. Some of this has been due to simple time constraints but it’s also due to laziness. Reading takes time and up until recently, my “free time” has been spent either on social media or knitting. Now that I’m a couple weeks into my fast from Twitter and Facebook, I find my mind more able to sit and focus. I’ve even been journaling semi-consistently.
For my birthday, I received a bunch of biographies that I had asked for from the Long Line of Godly Men series. I had read a good chunk of the ebook version on Isaac Watts but haven’t had a chance to continue so I’m leaving that one to the side for now and starting on The Expository Genius of John Calvin. I’m really looking forward to getting into it as I’ve been wanted to read more about the reformers and have been listening to the 5 Minutes in Church History podcast.

As soon as I finish this I’ll be sharing my thoughts here and then starting on either Luther’s biography or one of the Puritan Paperbacks.

Saturdays can be rough because I’m home all day until I need to go to work for the evening. But sometimes we get out of the house and spend a quick bit of time at the park after running errands. It helps so much and keeps me from feeling like I’m completely missing out on my kids growing up.

A Christian ministry in Kentucky is building a 1550-metre-long (510ft) wooden boat for a planned religious theme park.

The very idea of a religious theme park deeply offends me. The idea of a Christian theme park is absolutely asinine. It’s got nothing to do with the Gospel. It’s going to be as effective as The Buttercream Gang as an evangelistic tool.

It’s a waste of time and money that would be so much better used by actual ministries that are trying to reach the lost and need funding to support the pastors doing that work.

I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It’s old and a lot of it is broken. But it drives me to work every day and it drives me home at night. This is what I was welcomed by when I walked out of Chipotle to go home.

It’s been a little windy today. I’m glad my car isn’t nice because all I had to do was drive away tonight. Sometimes having a plain thing is having the best thing.

It’s been about… 48 hours since I started my FaceBreak and here’s what I’ve learned.

I checked it way more often then I thought

I don’t miss it

There are far better uses of time

I might be doing the same for Twitter soon. Between working two jobs and preparing liturgies and leading worship at Redeemer, it is making less and less sense for me to be spending any time on social media.

When I went on Facebook today, my timeline was filled with a lot of talk about being offended or not offended or being neutral about a brand. Why? Because this is America, where Christians have to get into a rage over whether or not something is Christian enough or too Christian or whatever. I’m not even sure.

But it’s taking up space in my brain and my brain is already cluttered. So I deleted Facebook from my phone and I’m not going to be checking it because most of the stuff that I see shared there has one of 8 flaws:

#brands

It’s something shared from one of the million “conservative but really, truly terrible” Facebook pages.

It’s something I’ve seen already possibly months before it shows up there.

Comments.

Nobody read the article.

Nobody cited a source.

Something was shared from Fox News.

Scripture was taken grossly out of context.

And then there’s the following which was written by an actual person and I literally can’t even:

So I’m taking a break from Facebook. Possibly forever.

Edit: if you leave a comment on the post to this on Facebook, I won’t see it. Leave a comment on the actual blog if you’d like to discuss.

I’m somewhat proud of my fingerpicking abilities as a guitarist. This is mostly due to the fact that I can Travis pick. Getting to where I am now with it took years of practice and really bad music-making.

But I cannot do anything even remotely close to this yet:

There is a movement in her playing that I can do if I’m not singing. Add singing in and something bad is going to happen.

Mostly, Medium is a good venue for writing. The editor is super-simple and the site looks great. Not messing with themes is definitely liberating and while I enjoyed my couple of weeks there, I have enough issues and complaints for me to know that I’m definitely not staying.

The editor is way too simple – I like to write in Markdown because it’s really easy for me to add links and emphasis to text like this just by adding a couple of asterisks. I had to wait for an update to Byword to be able to format my text in any way. Also, video embedding is vague at best. I like to share videos occasionally. That made it a problem.

The community is a bit… one-dimensional – it’s basically all startups and designers. I’m trying to weave a personal narrative and it doesn’t feel like a good place to do that sort of thing. Even though it’s kind of the perfect place for that.

Publications make no sense – I went there to try and start my own publication so I could use my own domain name. Trouble is that you can only add to a publication when you’re on an honest-to-blog desktop machine. I do almost all of my writing from my phone. Sometimes an iPad. I’m never at a traditional computer so writing under my own name is basically impossible.

So now I’m here and I’m trying not to spend any money because of secret reasons that will one day be shared.